‘My family in England derive endless pleasure from teasing me for my inability to articulate the difference between the brown grizzly creature and the brown liquid found in pubs.’
Philip Nanton is a writer and spoken-word performer from St. Vincent and the Grenadines who lives in Barbados.
Where are you really from?
As Britain reels from yet another example of the domain assumptions about who belongs on this sceptered isle, Philip Nanton reflects on his time as a Race Relations Adviser: ‘Two ham sarnies for the two nig-nogs: an insider/outsider view of England’.
Belonging and a sense of place
Two ham sarnies for the two nig-nogs: an insider/outside view of England.
Why I write
Seeing slantwise: learning to value ink darts, humour and nonsense in writing.
Philip Nanton in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
On Nanton’s witness of life in the Caribbean and use of creative writing as a way to capture its grounded reality.
Biography
Philip Nanton is Honorary Research Associate of the University of Birmingham. He was born in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and studied and lived in Britain from 1960 to 2000. Since 2000, he has lived in Barbados. His career began in British local government policymaking, and after completing his D.Phil at University of Sussex (1986), he combined the world of a practicing academic and that of a creative writer. He has published reviews of contemporary Caribbean literature in journals and magazines including Caribbean Review of Books, Shibboleths: a Journal of Theory and Criticism and Caribbean Quarterly.
He has more recently developed as a writer of humour and a spoken word performer. In 2008 he released a CD Island Voices from St. Christopher and the Barracudas: the book based on the CD was published in 2014 by Papillote Press. He has performed sketches from this collection across the region from Guyana to Jamaica. His second collection of sketches and poetry, Canouan Suite and Other Pieces (Papillote Press, 2016) was highly recommended in the 2018 Cuban Casa de las Americas Awards for Anglophone Caribbean Literature. In 2017, he published Frontiers of the Caribbean (Manchester University Press). He published Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press) in 2021, a biography of the Vincentian jazz musician and poet Shake Keane.
